My favorite films of 2025 featured a wider range of genres, budgets, and themes than in the past. From heart-wrenching dramas to maximalist action, and tiny Sundance debuts to $100 million studio blockbusters, all ten films give me hope for the industry’s future. While it’s an especially challenging time for filmmakers, theaters, and financiers, great art continues to flourish.
To avoid genre bias, my list is in alphabetical order and limited to theatrical or streaming releases from this year. There are also several buzzy films I wasn’t able to see before locking in my selections, including Urchin, Pillion, and Resurrection.
This is a knowingly flawed choice, primarily due to a formulaic romance during the film’s first hour. Even with some exceptional talent behind and in front of the camera — including Łukasz Żal’s naturalistic cinematography, Max Richter’s string and choir heavy score, and the chemistry between Paul Mescal and Jessie Buckley — I was surprised by how conventional everything felt.
Yet when tragedy strikes at the film’s midpoint, Buckley’s raw acting prowess is an inescapable draw. The titanic strength of the emotion on display by Buckley’s Agnes is so intoxicating, aided by Chloe Zhao’s subtle direction, that it is hard not to get swept away. The film beautifully shows how art serves as a medium to process emotions, especially in a sublime final twenty minutes.
The temptation to call this “Uncut Gems for motherhood” is obvious: restless, closeup camera work, constant anxiety, and director Mary Bronstein’s connection to the Safdie brothers. But Bronstein’s direction and Rose Byrne’s indelible performance set the film on its own distinct path. I loved the surreal imagery that keeps the audience questioning what is reality versus imagination. Non-traditional actors like Conan O’Brien and ASAP Rocky memorably fill out the supporting cast.
And among a year of many strong lead performances, Byrne is easily one of the best. She shifts between comedy and drama with ease, making her character a convincingly believable mother on the edge.
Jafar Panahi constructs a deceptively simple revenge thriller that works as a damming indictment of state-sponsored corruption, repression, and torture. While it attacks the brutal Iranian regime, the narrative poses universal questions about revenge, justice, and morality. What is the right response to atrocities? When is revenge justified? In a pervasively corrupt environment, how do we distinguish bad actors from good?
It is the most bare bones film on my top ten, with minimal technical affordances, no name actors, a relatively short runtime, and a tiny budget. But thanks to the narrative’s power and its strong ensemble cast, it’s the one movie I can’t stop thinking about.
While the film’s tone is largely tense, I give credit to Panahi for weaving in several very funny moments. There’s nothing quite like watching this film with a packed festival audience on the edge of their seats, only for the tension to deflate into laughter.
An exhilarating exploration of the costs of obsessive drive. In a role built around his star power, Timothée Chalamet’s Marty Mauser is a ping pong striver, hustler, and a narcissistic manipulator. Everything and everyone around Marty is disposable in his pursuit of greatness. It’s the kind of character that’s often deeply off-putting, but he retains just enough charisma for the audience to stay invested.
As a rebuke to escapist sports dramas that treat protagonists as saints and superheroes, the film never lets you forget that Marty is a poor Jewish kid surrounded by powerful forces. Jack Fisk’s stellar production design of 1950s New York reinforces that socioeconomic strata. Director Josh Safdie’s highly kinetic, frenzied style is infectious to watch and makes the two and a half hour runtime fly by.
Other below the line qualities revise what could have been a staid period drama into something thrillingly modern. DP Darius’s Khondji’s camera keeps the audience moving — using hurried telephoto shots and tracking Steadicams — while keeping the onscreen action clear. Daniel Lopatin’s anachronistic eighties inspired synth score works beautifully to boost the onscreen action.
Few directors can match Park Chan-Wook’s dazzling, pinpoint precise command of the frame. Given so much of this darkly comedic thriller revolves around elaborate assassination sequences, you get the rare pleasure of watching an absolute master in his element. On pure visual construction, nothing this year comes close.
Lee Byung-hun is terrific as laid off paper man Man-soo, deftly handling the screenplay’s frequent tonal shifts. He shifts from bumbling hitman to paranoid, jealous husband to mournful, depressed executive — sometimes within a single scene. Son Ye-jin, playing Man-soo’s wife Mi-Ri, makes the most of her handful of crucial moments in the plot.
It’s also the one film from Park I’d comfortably recommend to a wider audience. Unlike the director’s earlier colder revenge thrillers and chamber pieces, No Other Choice is comparatively warm and very funny, offering explicit social commentary and capitalist critique.
While it’s challenging to comment on legacy this early, I have high confidence Paul Thomas Anderson’s masterpiece will stand the test of time. One Battle After Another is an artistic juggernaut — politically relevant, with whip smart editing and restless, gorgeous VistaVision-based cinematography.
But potentially the biggest contribution to its long term cultural relevance is its genre: a warmly accessible, often hilarious action thriller. It’s a rare breed, a film as indebted to The French Connection and Dog Day Afternoon as it is to The Big Lebowski and Midnight Run.
None of this tightly layered, firebrand of a screenplay would land without such a strong ensemble cast. Watching Bob and Sensei Sergio team up to escape the law — two aged revolutionaries perfectly portrayed by Leonardo DiCaprio and Benicio del Toro — is a cinematic highlight of the year. It’s Leo at his loosest and funniest, contrasting perfectly with del Toro’s quiet man of action. Sean Penn adds complexity to what in other hands would be a cartoonishly racist villian. Regina Hall’s screentime is brief, yet I can’t stop thinking about the steely determination in her eyes over her brief intersections with others. Even newcomer Chase Infiniti, playing Bob’s daughter Willa, holds her own with nuanced facial acting.
Director Kleber Mendonça Filho noted during a Q&A where I saw the film that love, not bleakness, was the starting point for this thriller. It’s a beautiful distillation of why this movie has such a unique, warm character.
Filho subverts expectations: the first two thirds feature languid pacing, deep world building, and in-depth characterization that makes the film feel more like a hangout than a suspenseful drama. Lush, colorful cinematography makes the setting inviting. There is an open celebration of family, carnival, and cinema (love the Omen and Jaws references.)
Yet amidst the beauty, the film never lets us forget the danger and corruption of the late-seventies Brazilian dictatorship. Some commentary is explicit, like during a darkly funny prologue where cops at a gas station prioritize shaking down a character for money over investigating a murder victim. Other moments are more subtle, falling heavily on small interactions with Armando (Wagner Moura), a former professor attempting to flee persecution and resist the authoritarian regime.
Moura is sensational, charismatic and effortlessly conveying moral strength. He’s largely an assured, confident character which makes his brief flashes of fear and sadness all the more powerful.
I know some critics have disliked the film’s pacing, but I see its rhythm a distinct and powerful asset. We learn so much about this world and its characters that when the inevitable dominoes fall, the consequences hit harder.
In a year filled with pulse-quickening thrillers and moody period pieces, Sentimental Value stands alone in its ability to craft so much meaning from a few characters talking in a living room. Director Joachim Trier has practically superhuman instincts with his actors; they are universally well cast and given the space to add depth that feels true to life. Though his storylines are intentionally small in scale, Sentimental Value is his most ambitious and sprawling picture. For me it’s his best work to date.
The film is a deeply affecting examination of intergenerational trauma, the ways people work through mental health issues with art, and the struggle to reconnect with family. Key to unlocking these themes are phenomenal performances from father Gustav (Stellan Skarsgard), and his daughters Nora (Renate Reinsve) and Agnes (Inga Ibsdotter Lilleaas). Each actor relies on nuanced emotion, much of it through wordless reactions, to convey a richly melancholic texture.
This screenplay in lesser hands could have become mawkish or maudlin. Not so with Trier, who effortlessly shifts among moods, even when exploring openly dark subjects. It can be a very funny film; one scene where Gustav gifts his grandson DVDs of Irreversible and The Piano Teacher I guarantee absolutely killed at festival screenings.
Ryan Coogler’s Sinners is so ambitious that the screenplay feels slightly overstuffed. What could have easily been three or more hours of content feels messily trimmed down by forty minutes.
Yet I wouldn’t want the end product any other way. Coogler’s massive swing (with $100 million of studio money) — blending horror, thriller, action, and character drama — is precisely what makes it great. He explores racial progress, cultural appropriation, and economic exploitation under the trappings of a bloody vampire horror movie.
It’s also a blast to watch. Coogler has clearly learned from his time with Marvel and Creed how to entertain his audience. One of his smartest decisions is to provide a surprisingly long stretch of screen time building up his characters before all hell breaks loose. When the bloodletting commences, we are invested in the stakes. Coogler also has a great sense of pacing, using musical sequences and dialogue-heavy interludes to break up the action.
Durald Arkapaw’s cinematography is also beautiful and widely ambitious. Sinners is the first film to be shot on both Ultra Panavision 70 and IMAX. The Panavision scenes have a colorful, vintage widescreen look that’s distinctive and extraordinary rare. (Outside of 2015’s The Hateful Eight, the last feature shot on Ultra Panavision was from 1966.) A switch to IMAX provides additional vertical height to immerse the audience in several supernatural action and musical sequences.
Sirat is one of the most unique experimental films I’ve seen in years. Writer director Oliver Laxe grafts an art house movie onto a Mad Max inspired action thriller, and the results are both thrilling and harrowing. While my other favorites stand out for their engrossing plot or vibrant character arcs, Sirat is all about vibes: rattling techno sub-bass that put in me a trance (Kangding Ray’s score may be my favorite of year), stunning shots of vans blasting across the desert, and explosive, shocking twists.
It’s admittedly a filmic approach that divides audiences. Many will never connect with Laxe’s existential tone piece meets EDM rave structure. Reviews have criticized the film for a tedious, underdeveloped screenplay and cheap shocks. But I see Laxe’s uncompromising vision as its greatest strength. I found long passages hypnotic, its bold shocks to the system forcing the audience to confront tragedy head-on. Sometimes the only way to cope with suffering and a world on the brink of tearing itself apart is to dance.